life on the obverse

since last post, I had a great (eye-opening) experience in Las Vegas as the clock struck midnight on the New Year; I’ve also gone snowboarding with Erik at Mountain High. Devin left home to return to Berkeley early because of his cat allergies, an affliction that is becoming increasingly distressing to him when he returns to Mission Viejo. I went to Disneyland on my older brother’s annual pass (ho ho HO!) and visited Robert in North Hollywood after grabbing brunch with Taylor Wirth. After all these shenanigans, I returned to snowy Ithaca and conducted a lot of research in the quiescence of my office, enjoying the walks to and from campus and unseasonably warm weather.

My time here though has been anything but ordinary, shattering some opinions I previously held about my life as it stands. In general I have seen graduate school as a time of nominal change; certainly, I imagined, this would be the case compared with college. However, by four months from now I will lose four of my closest friends as they either end their graduate careers or decide to take a hiatus from research (and hence, Cornell). Two of these friends have been saying they’d leave since August; the other two I learned about within the past two weeks. This shift, the very core of my social life shedding spontaneously, has really disheartened me. This year has been nice because I’ve had a year of experiences with these friends to build upon. Now, I can’t help but feel like life will be a little empty next year.

What happened to nominal change in graduate school? What of the stability that was supposed to come with age? Clearly, this contention I previously held was just wrong. Graduate school is not certainty; at its core, it is still school. It is voluntary, costly (if not in money, then in work product and freedom), and like any other job it drops you in an environment that either suits you or doesn’t. It’s a different kind of evolution than undergrad; it is literally the transience of people and corresponding friendships.

After all is said and done, after this year is over, I will be losing close proximity to a broad spectrum of friends that stretches from master’s students in different colleges to even the most atomic of friendships I’ve formed since arriving at Cornell: to those in my own department. In tandem and quite separately I’ve been integrating into different areas of the campus. For instance, I recently was elected to be a member of the GPSA, hopefully bringing with it a commensurate increase in closeness to the rest of the members of the Assembly. I’m taking a course from the business school with a healthy cross-section from the rest of the graduate student community. In short, I’m trying to branch out socially, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but to which I felt considerable resistance as a first-year. Whether these friendships will lessen the pain of those friends leaving is yet to be discovered.

The complexity and relative impermanence of friendships here further convince me that college was an incredible and unique experience. I misread what is common versus uncommon outside of college, and am gradually overwriting my first impressions that were based on the undergraduate-like experience I was dropped into here at Cornell. Maybe this was what Professor Sachse was talking about when he said that the previous “undergrad-like” stage in my life was over, and that it’s now time to switch gears. More likely, I just wasn’t mentally ready for this impermanence all along.

such is the question repeatedly brought forth in the most recent installment of Jason Reitman’s dramatic films. Ryan Bingham (well performed by George Clooney), the strangely admirable, itinerant professional who delivers pink slips to the newly departed as a career, recites this question with just about as much detachment as he feels toward everyone else in his life. The analogy, which feels more trite than dynamic at the beginning of the movie, takes on increasingly darker shades of irony as Bingham’s lifestyle starts crumbling. What’s even more hackneyed is that such devastation sources from two of the most traditional wellsprings of human turmoil: one’s legacy, and one’s romances.

While I mention that these themes are cliche, I want to recognize that this film is both entertaining and thought-provoking. I (like my brother) would strongly recommend watching it, if for nothing else than to pick up a few tips on how to save time at the airport. Rather than continue explaining the film, which I hope folks will just watch anyway, I think it’s more interesting to muse on its themes. The question that I feel everyone exiting the theater must ask themselves is: how much am I weighed down by all of the possessions, property, and people in my life, and which of these things are potentially keeping me from being happy in life?

I’ll be honest, I think being a 20-something is great. I liked being a teenager, so maybe I just appreciate life in general; however, I would assert that right now I am free to pursue what I feel makes me happy. I have integrated myself in to the humble roots of a career, so I recognize that freedom no longer extends to all areas of my life– but I’ve made very few concessions in trading freedom for conveniences. But, I have to look no further than 4 months back, witnessing how much crap I had to pack last time I switched apartments, and it’s clear that there’s real inertia against pursuing alternative lifestyles and remaining dynamic. Clearly, my ability to remain mobile is disintegrating rapidly. Perhaps worse, I never realized I was trading more than money when I invested in some of the larger, heavier things I acquired in the past year and a half of graduate school.

What about relationships? I think the movie discussed the burdens of friendships and relationships quite well, fittingly using the phrase “everybody needs a copilot.” At my age, all that everyone seems to prioritize is whether they’re with someone for right now, but the long-term relationships and marriage are more often taboo in our circles, not something that we publicly recognize as a motivation for dating or friendships. The film gives only one scenario of how such thinking, perpetuated for too long, can (seemingly) only lead to limitless emptiness. Certainly, marriages fail obscenely frequently and family ties one down, but the pursuit of love can somehow defend against the visceral ache of loneliness despite the pain that relationships bring. Now, I’ve never successfully imagined myself as married, replete with family, house, and career. Only recently have I been able to envision myself with a career, but to conceive of myself as married with all that entails is still beyond my imagination. I can only assume that such a future is out there, though, and I’m happy with that much at the moment.

Because, let’s face it: figuratively loading a friend into your backpack is well worth the weight if your only alternative is to blaze the trail alone.

currently, major universities across the US are taking drastic measures to cope with their huge budget shortfalls. the University of California Board of Regents, for instance, just approved a 32% tuition uptick, thereby tripling the undergraduate academic fees over the course of a single decade. Harvard posted a 27% hit to their endowment, or a loss of $11 billion, the total endowment of MIT and twice the size of the entire UC system’s endowment. of course, such wincing financial burdens are impossible for a mere mortal like myself to wrap my head around, and even the simple statistic of an endowment drop is not a very good indicator of financial health. Instead, I suggest we look at the consequences the financial crisis has leveled against the institutions themselves.

Cornell is currently undergoing a stressful reorganization process that has been merrily named “Reimagining Cornell” by the Provost, as if we can still have lofty goals and dreams but that those dreams should be slightly modified in light of present circumstances. Those circumstances quite starkly include a 15% across-the-board budget cut, from all academic and administrative departments. Being that the huge preponderance of the budget is tied up in salaries of faculty and staff, it is clear that layoffs will be inevitable. The initial reports from Provost-organized task forces were released a couple weeks ago, and the options laid on the table are not-at-all for the feint of heart. A quick read through the College of Engineering 23-page report (the report for the entire University is over 300 pages) reveals that the budget cuts will need to affect every aspect of how we do business here.

In discussing the structure of the college, the task force laughingly recommends that all science-related fields be gutted from the College of Arts & Sciences and College of Agriculture & Life Sciences and merged into the College of Engineering. While the recommendation states that this would be “very complex,” and that “no further action” was taken by the committee to vet this proposal, it is still the number one recommendation provided by the committee to the Provost. It’s as if a few committed college administrators said “we couldn’t get our committee to agree on this, but that won’t shut us up.” While the report recommends no additional mergers (beyond the T&AM and M&AE merger from last December that effectively orphaned the department in which I was studying), it asserts that further collaboration is necessary in order to cut out “redundancy.” No definition to such heavy terms are provided, thereby exacerbating the feeling that I’m facing a thinly-veiled attempt at obfuscating the desired future of our college.

Other suggestions aired by the task force are similarly concerning:

• Halt recruitment of faculty and wait for natural attrition of professors as they retire. The report states “AEP and TAM/MAE will bear the brunt of faculty retirement.” Of course, department chairs don’t want to lose faculty lines indiscriminately, so as to incentivize chairs to encourage retirements, 25% of a faculty line will be returned to the department upon a professor’s departure. Any new faculty hired will be in the fields of bio & energy.
• Implement stronger post-tenure review. As a part of this process, each chair must identify the bottom 10% of faculty from each department to the Provost. This seems, to me, unprecedented.
• Cancel small- to medium-sized courses, especially graduate courses. This will effectively end many upper-division applied math courses at Cornell.
• Eliminate small-section teaching of math courses, thereby putting all graduate students currently teaching those courses out of work. This hits close to home, because about 50% of the T&AM field members are funded by teaching small-section math courses. If these are eliminated it seems almost political on the side of MAE, which sees our Teaching Assistantship culture versus their Research Assistantship culture akin to a country working with two currencies– sooner or later, one of them needs to fold.
• Increase incoming class size to the College by 10% to provide more money in tuition to the University, as if to say “if we give you more money, could you give us a little bit less of a budget cut?”

I find it mildly entertaining that the College of Engineering touts its moral high ground and “lean infrastructure” before it goes into any details of how it should deal with the cuts. Terms such as “societal good” and “strong net contributor” are self-aggrandizingly applied to our College, arguing that our dangerously low faculty:student ratio, the number of huge grants we haul in and the relative importance of STEM research do not justify budget cuts. I have mixed emotions toward using the necessity of STEM research to try to argue that our research is more important than that which is done by our liberal arts counterparts. While I would agree with Fareed Zakaria that the state of American innovation is quite abysmal, I know that other departments carry out research that is just as necessary to being human– even to understand what that means. However, I do know that the research we do takes hundreds (if not thousands) of times the amount of money of comparable breakthroughs in less technical fields, so perhaps that should be recognized when determining who gets cut the worst.

Other fun quotes from the report:

(on why no further administrative positions from IT can be cut from the college) “We often must rely on graduate students to support faculty IT needs as well as a great deal of purchasing activities in departments.” … no shit?

(on why this is not wholly about budget restructuring) “Some have expressed the view that due to initially small level of estimated savings, that all of this restructuring may not be ‘worth it.’ We believe it is, as many of these recommendations make sense, even without a financial forcing function.” you can always rely on management to say “we’re in deep trouble, we need to take drastic action;” stakeholders tacitly agreeing; and management taking that agreement as a mandate to change how business is done.

last week, I attended the ASME IDETC 2009 in San Diego, CA– a veritable buffet at which anyone with $500 and a stomach for endless lectures can learn about the newest research going on in the field of mechanical engineering. while ASME stands for “American Society of Mechanical Engineers,” duly note that the I in IDETC stands for International, and that is largely the constituency that this conference had in attendance. Not that this is a problem– a lot of good research is being done internationally and the ASME conference is a great place to publicize that research– it’s not a problem at least until you start having lectures which are read directly from slides and are completely incomprehensible.

I’ve sat through thousands of lectures in college at this point (I’ve actually calculated this; on average 4 classes/semester, 2.5 lectures/week/class, 16 weeks/semester, 10 semesters = 1600 lectures, not including the many guest lectures/seminars/symposia i’ve attended– and don’t hawk me for my units not working, the calculation makes sense). Many of these lectures given in college are delivered by professors, and at both UC Berkeley and Cornell, many of those professors are not American-born. I have had my fair share of sitting through lectures delivered by professors of different nationality or origin, but I really think they’re quite effective for the most part. However, this conference was very different– there were some lectures where I simply could not understand what the speaker was saying. Lost but still hopeful, I would turn to the presenter’s presentation slides as a lifesaver. In fact, this generally was just an incomprehensible mess of equations, formulae, figures, and text overlapping and creating an in general impossible-to-follow presentation.

And so many of these presentations wound on for hours each day, with my amazement at how difficult some of the lectures were to follow finding new depths by the session. Armed with the fear of my own presentation being so bloodily incomprehensible, I spent the evenings in my hotel room making change after change to try to build on what I saw as the shortcomings of others, and I think that helped a bit. However, as I delivered my own talk in front of my modestly sized audience, I couldn’t help but feel I was delivering the same shoddily-wrapped package of “cutting-edge” science as so many of those before me had.

However, I happily will add that there seems to be a silver lining underlying all of this: the well-respected profess(ionals|ors) that had been chosen to deliver the keynote or plenary lectures were spectacular. This means of course that here, in our time, there exist some engineers and scientists that are not only very capable of doing their own work, but also communicating that work to a broad audience. To me, that gives a glimmer of hope– we’re not all doomed to give muddled presentations on the work we slave over for the rest of our lives. Maybe someday when we’re >60 years old, we’ll have a chance to be effective communicators as well.

my attendance at the conference was preceded by a short trip home to visit friends and family, which was nice. My next trip back to CA won’t be until Christmas I presume, so that’s some time– and an entire new winter in Ithaca– away.

another one of graduate school’s most horrifying episodes are thankfully now behind me. unfortunately, I can’t say that about all of the folks that took the exam– which is testament to how difficult this thing really was.

the short rundown on the exam: it was made up of three committees, each one of them testing a different subject area. I had the first examination slot in the morning along with two others standing ahead of separate committees; my first assignment was applied mathematics. In this section, the primary subjects tested are knowledge of tensors and linear algebra, differential equations, complex variables and applications, and advanced multivariable calculus. I got five questions, with varying degrees of difficulty– some of them requiring some prompting, but all in all doing alright. There was a moment there, though were Hui was shaking his head at what I was writing. That was a little depressing.

Solid mechanics was next, and boy was this part of the exam easy. Two questions in total, both of them considerably in-depth but typical first-year graduate level continuum mechanics stuff. Some people got tripped up on this part because they forgot definitional equations, but I breezed through it.

Dynamics, supposedly “my best” subject, was last. THE MAN Rand, my advisor, was chair of the committee– and at the end, I was feeling like I may have been a disappointment to him. The first two questions were no problem for me, but as soon as Prof. Peck started asking his question I knew that I would start getting tripped up. There were ambiguous terms, questionable drawings, and all in all I think by the end of my 8 minutes trying to figure out the question most of the audience was thoroughly confused. It did not help that there were six people in this committee, and honestly I didn’t know who to address first or when to move on. It was just miserable.

So, by the end of the exam I wasn’t feeling too hot about it all. I went home, took care of some errands, and tried taking a nap. Failing to do so, Anita and I went to see District 9 at Ithaca Mall, which diverted my attention well. After the film was over, I took her back to campus– and on the way saw Prof. Strogatz walking out of Thurston Hall. Being that this was a good sign that the results for the exam were ready, I quickly parked and hustled up to Prof. Sachse’s office.

“Congratulations,” he said, as I felt my knees give out. To say I was apprehensive about that would be an understatement– and the sense of relief was overwhelming. We sat and chit-chatted for a bit about what this means for my future academic career, and I promptly left his office to go spread the word around that the results were ready.

This ends one chapter of hardship, but honestly I don’t feel too happy about it all. I really feel disappointed at how I performed during the exam, and I personally wonder why I got the grace of a pass when others did not. While I know I’ll never learned what was discussed as the faculty was voting to pass me or not, I feel like a sense of disappointment probably spread across them as well… and I guess that’s a little depressing for me to think about. But, onward and upward– it’s time to buckle down on research.

Now off to San Diego…